Byron Donalds criticizes Florida teaching rule regarding ‘personal benefits’ of slavery
Jack Birle
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Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) is calling for Florida’s black history standards to be adjusted after a line about skills black people may have learned while enslaved caused an uproar.
Donalds praised the overall standards as “good, robust, [and] accurate” but took issue with the line involving slavery, in a tweet on Wednesday.
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“The new African-American standards in FL are good, robust, & accurate. That being said, the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong & needs to be adjusted. That obviously wasn’t the goal & I have faith that FLDOE will correct this,” Donalds said.
The part of the standards, which were approved by the Florida Board of Education last week, in dispute is a clarification line on a benchmark about teaching students to examine what duties and trades slaves performed.
“Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” the clarification said.
Vice President Kamala Harris and others have criticized the standards as an “insult” and an “attempt to gaslight us,” but black scholars who developed the standards have defended the clarification as an important part of the full story of slavery. Dr. William Allen, a member of the Florida African American History Standards Workgroup, decried Harris’s criticism as an “absolute falsehood.”
“The accomplishments of black people post-slavery were the accomplishments not just of black Americans but the accomplishments of American principles,” Allen said on Fox News’s Jesse Waters Primetime on Monday.
“And that is the truth that people seek to deny by erasing the stories of people who lived through the histories,” he added.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dismissed Harris’s criticisms as well, saying she was trying to push a “fake narrative” about the standard.
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“These are very thorough standards done by African American history scholars,” said DeSantis. “There is no agenda here. It is just the truth.”
The extensive African-American History standards for the Sunshine State also require lessons on the cultural contributions of African Americans, the history of the slave trade, the Jim Crow era, along with race massacres in Tulsa and Atlanta, among other instances.